skopia
A Berkeley merchant drives France cellar by cellar, buying from small growers and arguing that filtering a wine bright strips out what you want to drink. Lynch taught Americans to taste for place.
Every grape that makes wine, 1,368 of them, traced by DNA to its parents and described by flavor. Zinfandel is revealed as a Croatian vine, and Sauvignon Blanc descends from Savagnin.
Wine as geography: Johnson and Robinson map every serious vineyard region on earth, down to the slope and soil, so you can see why one hillside tastes different from the next field over.
Sent to the Sorbonne in 1926, Liebling studied restaurants instead. Proust, he argues, simply lacked the appetite to eat properly. What follows is a young man's gluttonous education in Paris.